Hierachical blocks - the game plan

[guruofquality]

We should be able to implement the design and instantiation of hierarchical blocks within the GUI. Once implemented. Making a regular topology with IO pads, and exporting and reloading the plugin tree should be sufficient to use a hierarchy of blocks. An exported topology of blocks should have a full option set in terms of documentation, parameters, visually, etc to appear as any other handwritten block in the system. Here is the plan:

• The first step is to implement the JIT block registry. This is a conf-based block registry that allows the plugin tree to pick up on text-based blocks found on the file system. In this case, the registry will provide exported topologies and JSON markup from a graphical design.
• Additional graph properties will allow us to specify block documentation, parameter documentation, parameter widgets that will be used to generate the JSON markup.
• We will also need input and output pads to represent input and output flows of a hierarchy. These will be GraphObjects and parsed by the topology exporter to determine the connections between the interior blocks and the hierarchy ports. These blocks will appear in the graph properties to control the ordering.